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Only in the past 80 to 100 years have there been appreciable numbers of people walking on the earth without having been through the hitherto universal human experience of labor and delivery, the trip down the birth canal. In 1882 advances in surgical techniques made caesarean delivery a reasonably safe procedure for both the mother and the child. Before that, most of the mothers died.

Many commentators have remarked that birth is a sexual experience, namely Niles Newton, Ph.D., Lewis E. Mehl, M.D., Michel Odent, M.D., N. Kalichman, M.D., Thomas Verny, M.D. and others. Thousands of young couples, too, have made the same discovery and have used their innate, sexual endowments during the conjugal act of birth in the dimly-lit seclusion of their bedrooms with delight and distinction.

This paper presents the hypothesis that the woman's own experience of being born has an impact on how she will give birth. This impact is proposed to occur primarily through the birth story as symbol for a socialization process, in which the woman learns how to view her body and Nature and how to react to the sensations of labor. The more anxiously she reacts, the more likely that her body will hold "physiological expectations" of fear that will work against the process of birth.

The recently burgeoning phenomenon of search and reunion by adult adoptees and their birth families has uncovered fascinating information. During the author's doctoral research, reunited parents and children related uncanny coincidences that occurred during the years of their separation (e.g., dreaming of one's child in specific danger, naming a later child by the unknown name of the firstborn, knowing the day of a mother's death, vacationing in the same location, making identical purchases, and beginning to search at the same time).

Research has revealed that as early as the neonatal period infants possess innate capacities such as categorization and amodal perception that help them formulate representations of the "self and "other." This paper posits that in order to formulate these representations, the infant also requires exposure to a motivational environment that provides insight into the relationships between people.

From memories of his prenatal life the author presents a recollection, in the form of a poetic narrative, of how he started his heartbeat. He then gives a personal and transpersonal interpretation of the narrative in the adult-life context and proposes a theory of how an unborn may start its heart and what it learns from the experience. In support of his ideas he draws on examples from mythology, a modern-day ritual and common beliefs about the heart.

This paper focuses on the psychological aspects of prebirth and perinatal memories encoded for full term and premature infants and activated as possible pathology during adult life. It presents a brief recapitulation of the basic hypothesis that not only do human beings inherit the genetic coding of their mother and father, but also the mental and emotional states of their parents in the form of non-conscious emotional reaction patterns from the nine months of gestation including the continuum of the birth itself, as well as adjacent perinatal circumstances.

Current estimates are that one in every five women in the United States will have undergone at least one abortion, with 1.4 million abortions occurring annually. Increasingly, long-term stress reactions to abortion have been documented in the research literature. Post Abortion Syndrome (PAS), a variant of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, occurs in women who experience their abortions as traumatic. When the emotional components of the abortion experience are repressed, as in PAS, impacted grief and complicated mourning result.

This paper advances the proposition that in carrying out the decision to undergo elective abortion, a woman experiences a potentially traumatizing psychological event. Vignettes from clinical practice illumine the symptoms and development of post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of abortion. A model of psychic trauma is presented to account for the nature of abortion as a traumatic Stressor. It is based on psychoanalytic considerations, with an emphasis on the role of aggressive energy in the reconfiguring of psychic activities following trauma.

Four studies designed to investigate any association between induced abortion and child abuse found a number of positive correlations. These findings appear to run counter to popular opinion and some professional declarations that making abortion freely available would terminate unwanted children and thus lower the incidence of child mistreatment. There is no evidence that the incidence of child abuse has declined with more readily available abortion.